


Imperative Drives

by trascendenza



Category: Equilibrium, Firefly
Genre: Crossover, F/M, layers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-17
Updated: 2007-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-07 14:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"Broken gears sing a broken song," she says.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Imperative Drives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [paragraph porn-a-thon](http://technosage.livejournal.com/224268.html), prompt: awakening ([mirror](http://technosage.livejournal.com/224268.html?thread=5242380&style=mine#t5242380)).

"Not a machine, a structure, you're easier to deconstruct when you smile." She tilts her head at him, off-kilter, pushing her thumb into the corner of his mouth without any of the customary regard all other citizens would show for the space of a Cleric.

He doesn't smile, grabbing at her wrist. "You will come with me."

She shakes her head, smiling in a dreamy-sweet way. "The neural charge is stronger than the febrile tendon. Imperative drives." She looks at where he's holding her, and with what seems to be an imperceptible shift of her wrist, throws him up against the wall of her cell. "Imperative drives," she repeats, eyes widening as she examines him, ducking her head up and down, ghosting her fingers over his uniform like she's mapping him out. "Broken, broken, broken. The rivers are lost, like this River, the pathways all blocked." Her thumbs press in to the pulse points on his neck. "But I can fix them."

"I do not need to be fixed." He swallows, preparing to counter-attack, uncertain why he's waited this long to do so.

"Broken gears sing a broken song," she says, cutting him off with a kiss, her hands sliding lower and fingers pressing two spots at the base of his neck and rendering him unconscious.

*

He wakes in a room that he's been dreaming about for the last two weeks. It's packed to the brim with all the contraband he's seen in the dreams he's not supposed to have; every one ended with the room in flames, and a voice screaming out his name. He falls asleep again before he can figure out what it means.

*

"Patterns native to the metric mountain harmonics, Grammaton," he wakes up to hear her humming, her palm on his forehead, a slip of a dress barely covering her body.

"I..." He swallows, constricted by the flood of a strange sensation clenching his throat.

"A new song." Her eyes light up, and she lays down beside him. "Sing it with me?"

He has no idea what she's talking about, what she could possibly mean, until her arms go around his waist and he's not just flooded, he's _deluged_ with a tidal wave of sensation that burns immorality behind his eyelids when he tries to look away.

*

She speaks with complete lucidity, but none of it makes sense to him.

"Prozium induces dependences and the rebound effect of the withdrawal is notably overtaxing on the endocrine system." Her hips roll down onto his, nails scratching lines up his chest. "Graphs indicate a cessation of the effect around the third week, highest spike in documentation found in the fourth day of the second week due to a peak of neurochemical reactions built up over prolonged exposure to the inhibitor."

She's lit in warm flickers, a lantern glowing and casting her in an unreal glow. The way his body reacts to her is equally surreal, muscles and joints responding in ways he isn't dictating, harsh gasps coming out of his throat. He isn't even aware of the increase in his heartrate until it's pounding in his ears, waves of hair-raising sensitivity rushing over his skin. He's rocking into her without intention, something in his chest tightening at the rapturous expression on her face that he recognizes only because of his work classifying paintings; she looks just like one, pale and heavily shadowed, richly colored and overly expressive.

"Sing with me," she tells him, and cries out his name, and _this_, this is the burning, the onslaught of prickling flames through his body as he thrashes against the bed, up into her, and every nerve in his body awakens to her gentle, smiling touch.


End file.
